How modern technology has affected visual arts

Modern technology makes the visual arts more democratic, which is a massive opportunity, and a massive threat.

You can see both on Flickr. Go to the home page (www.flickr.com), and search for zombizi eye’. Yes the spelling matters. Somewhere near the top is an image just called eye, by yer man zombizi himself. Click on it.

He’s a mate, as it happens (one thing that never changes in art is the nepotism), but he’s a mate with talent. Click on the link for his photostream.

Some of them are really quite good, aren’t they? You know, like proper art or something. A genuinely new way for human beings to be interesting. There’s a craft there, a facility for camera and Photoshop, but also a knowledge of art history and an original eye, as it were.

Check out the comments. Everyone who comments has to have their own Flickr page, and some of them will repay your attention.

Most of them really won’t, though, and therein lies the aforesaid threat. There have always been people who thought they were van Gogh and weren’t, but in the olden days they never made it past the dealers, no matter how many appendages they hacked off. Today posting body parts has a different meaning, and anyone can be an artist.

Still, there are electronic tools for winnowing out the chaff, and I choose to celebrate rather than sneer. I’m particularly taken with the local Flickr group here in Bristol.

The group moves easily between the physical and the virtual. Once they realised they all lived in the same area, they started meeting in the real world. They go out socially, they go out on shoots. They bring their cameras to the pub, and make a big pile of them on the table. Then they photograph the pile, and put the picture on Flickr.

Last year they had an exhibition in a community centre. They printed some images out, framed them and hung them. People came and looked, and they sold some. Some of the exhibitors took pictures of the exhibition, and put them on Flickr.

I wrote an article about the group for Venue, our local listings magazine. They enjoyed the fleeting glow of publicity. Someone took a picture of the article, and stuck it on Flickr. Obviously.

They work in an impressively viral way. One of them, usually zombizi to be honest, has an idea. The others take it, make homages to it and play with it. Outsiders pick up on it, from New York to Kuala Lumpur. An idea which would once have taken an entire Renaissance to travel from Verona to Florence and back again by haywain now goes round the world in the blink of a Photoshopped eye. Ten or even five years ago, this couldn’t have happened.

So let’s hear it for the new medium. The same thing has happened with words, with videos, with music, all round. When I first started using the Internet, kids, it was somewhere you went to passively consume stuff the corporate technocrats made for us, or a forum for the private hobby horses of the HTML-speaking GeekBrahmins. You know, the people who gave us isolated capital letters in the middle of words. Now it really is kind of ours, in a way. Hooray, or something.